From James at Adzerk, here is a pretty interesting way to think of fighting ad fraud using the same trusted authorities and certificates used by SSL encryption for web pages. I’m pretty hopeful we’ll see some movement this direction in the advertising ecosystem.
Say The New York Times adopts a secure ads layer. Whenever impressions are served onnytimes.com, their private key is used to sign the full URL, a time stamp and the ad request’s user ID (cookie). The buyers, including the exchanges, DSPs or networks, would then use the Times’ public key to verify that the URL was indeed certified by the publisher.
Not only does this secure ad requests for publishers, it’s a huge opportunity for DSPs because they could enable buyers to purchase verified traffic and choose publishers based on their verified keys, as opposed to domain.
